blog/draft/2012-06-skolelinux-george-bredberg.txt

   1 Title: Debian Edu interview: George Bredberg
   2 Tags: english, debian edu, intervju
   3 Date: 2012-06-25 11:30
   4
   5 <p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
   6 Skolelinux</a> project have users all over the globe, but until
   7 recently we have not known about any users in Norway's neighbour
   8 Sweden.  This changed when George Bredberg showed up in March this
   9 year on the mailing list, asking interesting questions about how to
  10 adjust and scale the setup to his liking.  He granted me an interview,
  11 and I am happy to share his answers with you here.</p>
  12
  13 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
  14
  15 <p>I'm a 44 year old country guy that have been working 12 years at
  16 the same school as 50% IT-manager and 50% Teacher. My educational
  17 background is fil.kand in history and religious beliefs, an exam as a
  18 "folkhighschool" teacher, that is, for teaching grownups.  In
  19 Norwegian I believe it's called "Vuxenupplaring". I also have a master
  20 in "Technology and social change". So I'm not really a tech guy, I
  21 just like to study how humans and technology interact and that is my
  22 perspective when working with IT.</p>
  23
  24 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
  25 project?</strong></p>
  26
  27 I have followed the Skolelinux project for quite some time by
  28 now. Earlier I tested out the K12-LTSP project, which we used for some
  29 time, but I really like the idea of having a distribution aimed to be
  30 a complete solution for schools with necessary tools integrated. When
  31 K12-LTSP abandoned that idea some years ago, I started to look more
  32 seriously into Skolelinux instead.
  33
  34 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
  35 Edu?</strong></p>
  36
  37 The big point of Skolelinux to me is that it is a complete
  38 distribution, ready to install. It has LDAP-support, windows
  39 integration tools and so forth already configured, saving an
  40 administrator a lot of time and headache. We were using another Linux
  41 based thin-client system called Thinlinc, that has served us very
  42 well. But that is VNC-based and LTSP, to me, is better when it comes
  43 to the kind of multimedia used in schools. That is showing videos from
  44 Youtube or educational TV. It is also easier to mix thinclients with
  45 workstations, since the user settings will be the same. In our
  46 VNC-based solution you had to "beat around the bush" by setting up a
  47 second, hidden, home-directory for user settings for the workstations,
  48 because they will be different from the ones used on the
  49 thinclients. Skolelinux support for diskless workstations are very
  50 convenient since a school today often need to use a class room
  51 projector showing videos in full screen. That is easily done with a
  52 small integrated media computer running as a diskless workstation. You
  53 have only two installs to update and configure. One for the thin
  54 clients and one for the workstations. Also saving a lot of time.  Our
  55 old system was also based on Redhat and CentOS. They are both very
  56 nice distributions, but they are sometimes painfully slow when it
  57 comes to updating multimedia support and multimedia programs (even
  58 such as Gimp), leaving us with a bit "oldish" applications. Debian is
  59 quicker to update.
  60
  61 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
  62 Edu?</strong></p>
  63
  64 <p>Debian is a bit to quick when it comes to updating. As an example
  65 we use old HP terminals as thinclients, and two times already this
  66 year (2012) the updates you get from the repositories has stopped
  67 sound from working with them.  It's a kernel/ALSA issue. So you have
  68 to be more careful properly testing the updates before you run them in
  69 a production environment. This has never happened with CentOS.</p>
  70
  71 <p>I also would like to be able to set my own domain-settings at
  72 install time. In Skolelinux they are kind of hard coded into the
  73 distribution, when it comes to LDAP and at least samba
  74 integration. That is more a cosmetic /translation issue, and not a
  75 real problem.  Running windows applications within the Skolelinux
  76 environment needs to be better supported. That is, running them
  77 seamlessly via RDP, and support for single-sign on.  That will make
  78 the transition to free software easier, because you can keep the
  79 applications you really need. No support will make it impossible if
  80 you work in a school were some applications cant be open source. As
  81 for us we really need to run InDesign in our journalist classes.</p>
  82
  83
  84 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
  85
  86 <p>Myself I'm running Linux Mint, or Ubuntu these days. I use almost
  87 only open source software, and preferably Linux based. When it comes
  88 to most used applications its OpenOffice, and Firefox (of course ;)
  89 )</p>
  90
  91 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
  92 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
  93
  94 <p>To get schools to use free software there has to be good open
  95 source software that are windows based, to ease the transition. But
  96 it's also very important that the multimedia support is working
  97 flawlessly. Problems with Youtube, Twitter, Facebook and whatever will
  98 create problems when it comes to both teachers and students. Economy
  99 are also important for schools, so using thinclients,as long as they
 100 have good multimedia support, are a very good idea. It's also
 101 important that the open source software works even for the
 102 administration. It's hard to convince the teachers to stick with open
 103 source, if the principal has to run Windows. It also creates a problem
 104 if some classes has to use Windows for there tasks, since that will
 105 create a difference in "status" between classes, so a good support for
 106 running windows applications via the thin client (Linux) desktop is
 107 essential. At least at our school, where we have mixed level of
 108 educations, from high-school to journalist-school.</p>
 109
 110
 111     > Is this Adobe InDesign?  What is it doing that the free software
 112     > alternatives can not offer?
 113
 114 We run a journalist education.  One of the very few non university
 115 ones that is ok:d by Svenska journalistförbundet, and that gives the
 116 pupils the right of membership there, once they are done. (Important
 117 if you want to get a job.)
 118
 119 InDesign is the program most commonly used in newspapers and
 120 magazines. We used Quark Express before, but they seem to loose there
 121 market to Adobe. The only "equivalent" to InDesign in the opensource
 122 world is Scribus, and its not advanced enough. At least not according
 123 to the teacher. I think it would be possible to use it, because they
 124 are not supposed to learn a program, they are supposed to learn how to
 125 edit and compile a newspaper. But politically at our school we are not
 126 there yet. And Scribus lacks a lot of things you find i InDesign.
 127
 128 We used even a windows program for sound editing when it comes to the
 129 radio-journalist part. The year to come we are going to try
 130 Audacity. That software has the same kind of limitations compared to
 131 Adobe Audition, but that teacher is a bit more openminded. We have
 132 tried Ardour also, but that instead is more like a music studio
 133 program, not intended for the kind of editing taking place in a radio
 134 studio. Its way to complex and the gui is to scattered when you only
 135 want to cut, make passovers, add extra channels and normalize. Thoose
 136 things you can do in Audacity, but its not as easy as in Audition. You
 137 have to do more things manually with envelopes, and that is a bit old
 138 fashion and timewasting. Its also harder to cut and move sound from
 139 one channel to another, which is a thing that you do frequentlly
 140 because you often find yourself needing to rearrange parts of the
 141 sound file.
 142
 143 So, I am not sure we will succed in replacing even Audition, but we
 144 will try.  Problem is the students have certain expectations when they
 145 start an education towards a profession. So the programs has to look
 146 and feel professional. Good thing with radio, there are many programs
 147 out there, that radio studios use, so its not as standardised as
 148 Newspaper editing. That means, it does not really matter what program
 149 they learn, because once they start working they still have to learn
 150 the program the studio uses, so instead focus has to be to learn the
 151 editing part without to much focus on a specific software.
 152